Josh Reviews What If…? Season Three!

As a kid growing up reading What If…? comic books from Marvel, I never in a million years imagined I’d ever get to see a What If…? TV show.  So, while this show has never quite lived up to what I’d hoped it would be, I have to acknowledge right at the top how cool it is that this show exists, and that we got three seasons of alternate versions of MCU stories and characters where things played out differently than they did on the “sacred timeline”.

What If…? drew to a close with this third and final season, in which we got eight new adventures (one fewer, for some reason, than each of the first two seasons.).  I enjoyed watching every episode of this season, though looking back on it, I think this is my least favorite of the three seasons.  I think I’ve gotten a little more frustrated by the flaws of this show at this point.  (Click here for my review of season one, and click here for my review of season two.)

What works?  It’s fun to see different versions of events and characters from the MCU, and the MCU has developed a deep enough bench at this point that the show was able to make great use of various characters from across the movies and TV shows to give us lots of unexpected character combinations.  And so, for example, this season we got to see Agatha Harkness and Kingo from The Eternals on a Hollywood adventure, and Shang Chi and Kate Bishop paired up in the Old West, and Darcy and Howard the Duck as a couple… and lots more!  That was cool, and the show did a nice job shining a spotlight on some of those second-tier characters.  (Darcy has gotten way more to do on What If…? than in the main MCU so far…!  I loved seeing Darcy in WandaVision, but that was several years ago already; I wish they’d find a way to bring her back into the live-action MCU.)

For the most part, the show has managed to score the live-action actors to voice their voices on this animated show, which is very cool and really helps this show feel like a true part of the MCU saga.  The show looks great — we get to see lots of different locations and time-periods from across the MCU, and they all look terrific.  The rotoscope-looking style of the animation is cool, and we get some great action.  (Sometimes the attempt to capture a realistic look to the characters hurts, and characters such as the Winter Soldier wind up looking a little too generic; some stylization or caricature might have helped.  But it’s a forgivable sin, and having most of the real actors involved helps overcome this.)  I really liked that each episode this season opened with a different type of animated opening, referencing different eras and styles of cartoons.  That was fun!

What doesn’t work?  I continue to wish the show would be bolder.  I want to see wilder stories and fewer happy endings.  (The fun of the original What If…? comics was that many of them ended badly, with horrible fates for our heroes.  The series has never captured that fun, crazy, “anything can happen” feel.)  For some reason, the show has never seemed to have faith in the anthology structure, insisting on having each season end in a crossover (bringing back characters from previous episodes).  In a show with not so many episodes each season, too many episodes are sequels or callbacks to earlier episodes.  I’d rather the show focused on more original stories, both because I think that’d help the show feel fresher and more exciting, and because I don’t think any of the three season-ending crossovers have been all that interesting.  This season ends with the Watcher on trial for interfering in the events of the multiverse, but I didn’t think the story worked.  First, the episode in which we see the Watcher cross the line and save Riri Williams totally bungled that moment.  It should have been a shocking surprise, but the narration in the episode had made it thuddingly obvious that the Watcher wasn’t going to let her die.  Ugh; that was amateurish storytelling.  Also, we’ve seen the Watcher break his non-interference oath and get involved plenty of times before, starting in season one, so this time it had less impact.  Also, as I’d mentioned back in my review of season one, the show never properly established what the Watchers’ mission is and WHY they’ve taken an oath never to get involved in the events of the multiverse.  So the Watcher’s oath feels dumb, and we’re rooting for him to get involved; there’s no gray area here that would’ve made for a more interesting moral debate about the Watcher’s actions.

Shall we dive in and take a deeper look at this season’s episodes?

Episode 01 — “What If… the Hulk Fought the Mech Avengers?” — I grew up watching TV shows about giant robots that combine into even more giant robots (Yay, Voltron!!), so seeing an Avengers version of that type of show was fun.  I wish they’d dug deeper into the concept and had more giant robot mayhem and less melodrama about Sam Wilson and Bruce Banner’s broken friendship.

Episode 02 — “What If… Agatha Went to Hollywood?” — Pairing up Agatha Harkness and Kingo from The Eternals on an adventure in old Hollywood is a terrific concept.  It was a pleasure to hear Kathryn Hahn and Kumail Nanjiani return to voice these great characters!  I wish the episode was funnier, and I wish it didn’t build to a lame “this is why movies are important” conclusion (which to me felt out of place in the episode, the whole plot of which was about Agatha using movies as a secret spell).  I did love the dance number, though!

Episode 03 — “What If… the Red Guardian Stopped the Winter Soldier?” — This was by far my favorite episode of the season, as the Red Guardian (David Harbour, reprising his character from Black Widow) and The Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) go on an adventure in the eighties.  I loved the silly buddy team-up of Red Guardian and Winter Soldier.  This was a terrific idea.  Will we see more of this dynamic in the upcoming Thunderbolts movie??  I hope so!!  (I wonder if, when this episode originally went into production, they’d expected the Thunderbolts movie to have been out by now…?)

Episode 04 — “What If… Howard the Duck Got Hitched?” — OK, I know I complained above that this show gave us too many sequels to previous episodes, and I stand by that.  But back in my review season one, I’d said that I’d love to see a Howard and Darcy spin-off episode (after their terrific appearance in the otherwise so-so episode about Thor throwing a massive party on Earth), so I’m happy that the show delivered on that!  It’s a pleasure seeing Darcy (Kat Dennings) and Howard (voiced here by Seth Green) together.  They make a fantastic pair!  And it was fun to see them going on this intergalactic adventure, in an attempt to save the egg that contains their child!  (I have a lot of questions about that…!!)  (That the Grandmaster wanted their egg, not because he wanted to control the super-being growing inside it, but just because he wanted to eat it, was a great joke!)

Episode 05 — “What If… the Emergence Destroyed the Earth?” — I was excited for an episode following up on The Eternals, but disappointingly this episode had very little to do with the Eternals.  Instead, it was a Riri Williams showcase — and don’t get me wrong, I liked Riri in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and I loved that she got a What If…? episode of her own!  It’s just that in the absence of a second Eternals movie, I’d been excited for an Eternals episode of the show.  Oh well.  Beyond that complaint, I wish this episode made more sense.  How is anyone still able to live (basically normally) despite Earth’s having been smashed into pieces by the birth of the Celestial?  (They needed a line about Stark tech somehow recapturing the atmosphere, or Dr. Strange & Wong’s using magic to do so, or something like that.)  How was Quentin Beck of all people able to take control of the world?  That being said, it was nice to see Riri get to save the day, even in the face of the apocalypse.

Episode 06 — “What If… 1872?” — Here’s another episode with a very cool premise — Shang-Chi and Kate Bishop on an adventure together in the Old West — but where I felt the execution fell short.  I liked that Shang-Chi was called the Ten Rings because he’d appear whenever someone called for help by ringing a bell ten times — but just how did Shang-Chi manage to do that?  Why doesn’t Kate have anything to do (other than, oops, accidentally murdering Shang-Chi’s sister, which the show just hand-waves away like it’s no big deal)?  Who or what is the Hood?  (The Hood is an interesting character from the comics and apparently he’ll be the villain in the upcoming Riri Williams Ironheart show.  Between this episode and the previous one, there’s no question that the makers of What If…? thought that Ironheart — which was filmed way back in 2022 — would have been released before now!!)  I did love hearing the great Walton Goggins voice a villain.

Episode 07 — “What If… the Watcher Disappeared?” — The Watcher has been captured and is being put on trial by his fellow Watchers, and it’s up to his team of multiversal superheroes to rescue him.  As I wrote above, I don’t like the idea of a What If…? crossover, and I don’t think this was executed particularly well.  BUT I did dig the lineup of the Watcher’s team of multiversal heroes: it’s always a pleasure to see Hayley Atwell back as Captain Carter; I loved Kahhori in season two and was happy to see her again; it was a hoot hearing Natasha Lyonne (Russian Doll, Poker Face) voice Byrdie, the grown-up kid of Darcy and Howard the Duck (though it took me forever to figure out who this new character was supposed to be); and I was overjoyed to see the first full appearance of Storm in the MCU!!!  That was so cool — and that she was voiced by X-Men ’97 voice-actress Alison Sealy-Smith was even better!!!!  AND that this Storm was an Asgardian goddess wielding Mjolnir — a callback to the classic X-Men Asgardian Wars storyline written by Chris Claremont and illustrated by Arthur Adams from the eighties — made me so, so happy!!  I also liked hearing Jason Isaacs (Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies) as the voice of the evil Watcher, the Eminence — and I loved that they replaced Uatu’s usual monologue in the opening credits with a new evil monologue by the Eminence!

Episode 08 — “What If… What If?” — the season and the show come to a conclusion as the multiversal heroes fight to rescue the Watcher.  This one unfortunately fell flat for me; I wasn’t so excited to see the Infinity Ultron (from season one) again (without James Spader’s voice, this Ultron isn’t very interesting to me), and all the fighting seemed boring and silly, as there really shouldn’t be any way these mortal heroes could hold their own (or have any hope of defeating) cosmic beings like the Watchers in a face-to-face slugfest.  Oh well.

So, that seems to be it for What If…?  I’m glad this show exists and I’ve definitely had fun watching these three seasons.  I’d love it if someday the folks at Marvel took another whack at this and tried to be a little bolder (and a little less goofy) with the storytelling.  But this was a fine show and there are definitely episodes in these three seasons worth revisiting.

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